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Degree of difficulty

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In video gaming, "difficulty" often does not refer to how difficult a game is in general, but rather to a setting of the game, often chosen by the player in the menu or at the beginning of the game. Sometimes, the difficulty is set for the entirety of the game, sometimes it can be changed during the game. In many video games, difficulty modes run on a general scale of:

Very easy (sometimes known as "beginner", "novice", "basic", etc.)

Easy

Normal (sometimes known as "medium", "intermediate", etc.)

Hard

Very hard (sometimes known as "hardcore", "nightmare", "extreme", "impossible", etc.)

Many video games use varieties of these as game modes. For instance, the Call of Duty franchise ranks its games on a scale of "Recruit", "Regular", "Hardened", and "Veteran", to stay with the military setting of the games.[5] Similar to this, the 2010 top-down zombie shooter Dead Nation's difficulty levels are called "Braindead", "Normal", "Grim", "Morbid" and "Undead".[6] Some games reward or punish players for their choice of difficulty. For instance, 2007 indie platformer I Wanna Be the Guy was created to be extremely hard to finish, and to illustrate this it uses the difficulty scale "Medium", "Hard", "Very Hard", and "Impossible", with no "Easy" mode or equivalent. If the player chooses "Medium", they will have a pink ribbon in their hair throughout the entire game as a sort of punishment for this.[7] In games from the Kingdom Hearts series, unlockable post-game levels and bosses are often unlocked differently per difficulty level, with the easier difficulties usually making it harder to unlock these and vice versa, and these games often contain certain content that can only be unlocked by beating the highest difficulty level, usually called "Proud Mode" or "Critical Mode".[8]